Wild Bill Hickok shot before he could play his last hand

Most games of cards don't ascribe to the title of Groucho Marx's TV show "You Bet Your Life," but there was a notable one that occurred in August of 1876 in Deadwood, Dakota Territory.

This was a couple of months following the Custer fight a few hundred miles to the west on the banks of the Little Bighorn River (the Greasy Grass to the Sioux and Cheyenne).

This was still wild country and Deadwood was a tough town.

High stakes poker games were common in the saloons so the game in Saloon #10 was not unusual. However, the seating arrangement was.

James Butler Hickok was late in arriving and his usual seat facing the open bar area was taken and he was left with a chair with its back to the door.

He asked the other gamblers to change seats but all refused citing the superstition that it would spoil their luck. So, Wild Bill was left with his back exposed.

He had just been dealt: the ace of clubs, the ace of spades, the eight of clubs, the eight of spades and the queen of hearts. At that point Jack McCall entered the saloon and approached Wild Bill from the rear unnoticed. McCall shot him in the back of the head and fled the saloon.

They were not strangers. McCall had lost $500 to Bill in a poker game the prior day and there was previous "bad blood" between them.

Although many Western films have portrayed Wild Bill Hickok as a "fast draw" gunfighter, that was a Hollywood creation. There were few shootouts of that kind in the real West.

Advertisement

Hickok had served as peace officer in Hays City and Abilene, Kan., where he did kill four men in the line of duty.

He fell from grace in Abilene in 1871 when he loosed a fusillade of shots at a group of quarrelsome drunks. He killed one drunk but also a policeman and the city council fired him.

His career for the next five years was mostly gambling and wandering.

His shooting skills had diminished but he was still not to be taken lightly.

Before he was hanged for the murder McCall said he had not dared to call out Hickok face to face because "I didn't want to commit suicide."

That particular hand came to be called a "dead man's hand" by professional poker players.

In the following years, before the casinos were allowed in Deadwood, each summer the town held a re-enactment of the shooting and the capture and trial of Jack McCall. I watched a part of it one summer before the action went inside and they charged admission.

Another curiosity when I was there as a teenager was that there was more than one Saloon #10. The only explanation that made sense was that they dragged Wild Bill's body into several bars so they could claim Wild Bill Hickok was shot here.

Wild Bill is buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery above the city as is Martha Jane Canary (Calamity Jane) who looked nothing like Doris Day and was not a paramour of Bill's.

Reality is not as glamourous as portrayed in film and television.

Jim Willard, a Loveland resident since 1967, retired from Hewlett-Packard after 33 years to focus on less trivial things. He calls Twoey, his bichon frisé-Maltese dog, vice president of research for his column.